Feeling safe from the Wild Things

September 30, 2013 2:19 PM

The introduction of Carol, [James] Gandolfini's character, plays him as a figure of menace until the last possible moment, and we see a lot of him in silhouette. Allen held my hand, squeezing as hard as he could, and at one point, he said, very quietly, "He's very mad. Someone made him so mad." And then, even more quietly, "His kids must have been very bad."

As part of his Film Nerd 2.0 series, Drew McWeeny watches Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are with his sons.
posted by Johnny Assay (25 comments total)

at one point, he said, very quietly, "He's very mad. Someone made him so mad." And then, even more quietly, "His kids must have been very bad."

Recently ended up in a not great part of town with my nephew in the car, it was his first experience seeing people severely down on their luck. After a while, he said, very quietly, "Something made them very sad, I think something bad happened".

Kids are just awesome, as is this movie.
posted by Cosine at 2:24 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]

God his voice in that movie is definitely the star. At this point just seeing Jim Gandolfini's name make me tear up, no way I'm reading this.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:29 PM on September 30, 2013 [2 favorites]

Accidentally read all of it and had to go splash hot tea in my eyes to stop them from falling out of my head, good but very very sad do not read. F-
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:07 PM on September 30, 2013 [4 favorites]

I have yet to see the film; however, I know the experience of re-examining your own actions through the eyes of my child.

It is amazing how tough parenting is, how so much adult-adolescent bullshit parents become immediately held accountable for. There is no room for nuance because kids don't get it, and there's no room for anger because ... well, get angry with kids - see what happens. It doesn't work. Instead, you've got this perfect innocence - maybe not perfect behaviorally, but someone who really - has no coping mechanisms for your bullshit anger. Getting angry is quickly no solution - just something else that causes problems and you find yourself fighting your own demons via the proxy of your child.

Then you throw on the adult reality that you can't keep up with the changing reality that your kids now deal with - that kids are writing in journals in kindergarten, that your school now has lockdown procedures, that getting your kid out at the end of the day is a cross between a baggage check and an FBI interrogation, that social media your kids may be exposed to is anti-social, that your two year old can start a movie on a tablet, that walking to school is no longer possible, that biking across town is now a potential trigger of an amber alert... Childhood is nothing like childhood was. Don't get me wrong - there's a lot that's good too, but wow... there is no going back and very low protection.

Nassim Taleb talks about the construct of fragility. Every rule we apply to safeguard our kids, to educate them more effectively, every test they push for - makes a more fragile system. And the system responds the same way the markets do, and in many cases winds up with more rules applied via ADHD and Autism and Aspergers and IEPs and Occupational Therapy for your child. Markets aren't people, and they fail under the strain that is applied to them in the petri-dish that is capitalism.

Max misbehaved and was called wild thing by his mother - which he then responded by saying he would eat her up. Really max? That's just asking for an early bedtime. The monsters sent him to bed because they couldn't handle him. They gnashed their terrible teeth, they roared their terrible roars - and why wouldn't you want to sail off through the night and into and out of weeks? Max tamed the wild things. Kids can do it.
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:10 PM on September 30, 2013 [15 favorites]

I really really liked Where The Wild Things Are. I'll bet it was kind of a headache to market: based on a children's book, but the movie isn't really a kid's movie. It's a movie about childhood. Young kids would be alternately bored and terrified watching it.
posted by zardoz at 3:54 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]

Great article. I can' t find it now, but several years ago I read a Livejournal entry with the thesis that Max's father (who as I understand it doesn't appear in the movie) is an alcoholic given subtle clues that, as the child of an alcoholic, he recognized. Wish I could find it now.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 4:26 PM on September 30, 2013

I've never had a movie feel so magical and leave me in such an odd mood afterward.

I felt strangely drained and heartbroken after watching it. I'll be damned if I could ever explain why. And I can't bring myself to watch it again.
posted by theBigRedKittyPurrs at 4:35 PM on September 30, 2013 [4 favorites]

Parenting is hard work, emotionally speaking, and so is marriage, and the two of them together, along with work and money and stress and everything else, can just wear you down...My single worst quality, bar none, is that I have a volcanic temper.

Sorry to grab the low-hanging fruit here, but I think I would too if my last name was McWeeny. That doesn't even sound real.
posted by clockzero at 4:51 PM on September 30, 2013

And I can't bring myself to watch it again.

Same here, and I really WANT to watch it again, because I'm so curious about the effect it had on me. I'm just not sure I want to go through that effect again just to analyze it.

Completely, yes. My wife and I saw it in theaters and at the end we both agreed it was a very good film and then we drove the rest of the home in a deep silence and never watched the movie ever again.
posted by Doleful Creature at 4:51 PM on September 30, 2013 [2 favorites]

I felt strangely drained and heartbroken after watching it. I'll be damned if I could ever explain why. And I can't bring myself to watch it again.

Because it's about death and loss and ugh I can't even talk about it HELP FEELINGS
posted by elizardbits at 4:53 PM on September 30, 2013 [3 favorites]

I don't fully remember my reaction to the film, though, when I tried to watch it again, I ended up turning it off.

Deep down, I wanted Where the Wild Things Are on film. The movie was something very, very different. It's not that the movie, as it was, wasn't something also good, it's just that it took something I very deeply treasured and made it into a catharsis for someone who was very definitely not me.

I can't actually think of any way to say what I want to say without seeming horribly petty. I don't know. To some extent, the film takes a universal story, a story with appeal to pretty much everyone, and turns it into an epic of navel gazing and doubt.

There were a great many parts of the film that I found deeply moving, incredibly powerful, yet so much else, those are the things that keep me from watching it again, although I would very much like to.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:10 PM on September 30, 2013 [6 favorites]

I'm sad to find only one youtube video that mixes in VO from another Gandolfini movie.
posted by squinty at 5:26 PM on September 30, 2013

It's an amazing film, and the people who complained about it being too dark totally missed the point. Where the Wild Things Are is supposed to be wild and dark and scary in spots. Maurice Sendak adored it, and that's probably the best review it could ever have.

I can relate to the frustration of seeing one of your favorite books transformed for the big screen. I have a major grudge against Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, for instance, because it's miles from the book and I wanted the freaking book. But Wild Things is a very short book, and it would be impossible to adapt it as a feature film without expanding on it a lot. If they'd made one of those gross, loud kiddie movie things, like poor Dr. Seuss is so often subjected to, the movie probably would've been a bigger hit and it probably would've been better-reviewed, too. But it also would've been an insult to the spirit of the book, and it would've been quickly forgotten. Nobody who sees Wild Things ever forgets it, and I suspect that posterity will be very kind to it.

I thought this was a very good column, but it only reaffirmed my decision to never breed. I already feel crappy enough when the cat acts terrified because I snapped at him about walking across my keyboard again.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:07 PM on September 30, 2013

I liked that article and I'm glad that watching the movie with his kids opened his eyes as it did. But I fucking hate that movie. Not that it is a badly made movie, just that my wife and I loved that book as children and were very excited about the movie. Then the movie made us feel very, very sad. We did not want to feel sad. It was so overpowering it made us not even want to have the book in our house for years. We are finally getting over it. Our children will not be watching that movie. There's enough sadness in the world.
posted by agentofselection at 6:24 PM on September 30, 2013

Ursula Hitler It's an amazing film, and the people who complained about it being too dark totally missed the point.

No, I got the point. But the book had elements that were sad and dark and scary at one developmental level, and the movie's darkness was at a higher developmental level. I did not expect to have the film cross those boundaries and be so much more grown-up than the book, and I did not like the experience. There is room for sad, grown-up films in the world, and I love many of them, but there is no room for grown-up levels of sad in the children's books in my heart.
posted by agentofselection at 6:28 PM on September 30, 2013 [4 favorites]

The trailer was so good, I cried watching it. I couldn't wait for opening night, having treasured the book and really almost every piece of Sendak's art as a kid. Then I saw the movie and it left me cold. "Meh," I said when I walked out of the theater, "that was dissapointing." I think what Ghidorah said was very apt. The film turned what was universal into something intensely personal for someone I don't really relate to. It was hard not feel like something had been stolen from my childhood.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 7:19 PM on September 30, 2013

The more I try to think back on it, the more I remember how wildly I went back and forth. There were parts that had me sobbing, but there were other parts I remember being angry about. I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie that provoked such wildly disparate responses, yet left me without a desire to see it again.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:46 PM on September 30, 2013

The thing that struck me maybe the most was how, within the fairly equal mix of adults and kids in the theatre on opening night, how confused and quiet the kids got looking between the screen and their accompanying adults, most of whom were in pieces by the end.
posted by elizardbits at 7:48 PM on September 30, 2013

I really, really love that film. I can think of few films that so artfully combine sheer wonder and such terrible sadness. I love the scenery and the monsters and Karen O's soundtrack, especially her take on Daniel Johnston's 'Worried Shoes.'

And yeah, it's completely heart-rending, the whole thing, but it's about going on with everything in spite of how small and petty we can be, and how we find ourselves driven by the weaknesses and problems and flaws that somehow still make us whole human beings. And yet, the world is still a pretty magical place.

My shoes took me down a crooked path,
Away from all welcome mats,
My worried shoes,

I looked all around and saw the sun shining down,
Took off my worried shoes, my worried shoes

posted by kaibutsu at 8:02 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]

For all the talk about how dark the film is, it actually has a happy ending. Max makes it home to his mom, they are glad to be reunited and they seem to have reached a new understanding of each other. And Max gets cake. And to get there, it's not like the whole movie was a big mope. It's strange and scary, but it's also funny and sweet.

It is sad, when he leaves the monsters behind... but I don't think there's anything wrong with kid movies having terribly sad parts. Dumbo and Bambi are famously heartbreaking, for instance. Loss and sadness are an inevitable part of growing up. IIRC the studio came very close to scrapping the finished picture and starting over, and we are very lucky they didn't.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:47 PM on September 30, 2013

Wait wait wait... was the cake hot? Because the whole thing about going to where the wild things were was that at the end his dinner was still warm. Don't tell me they deviated from the book.
posted by Nanukthedog at 9:53 PM on September 30, 2013

The criticism of the film (both by critics then and folks on this thread) is that the movie took such a big departure from the book and much of it is somber and heavy. That's what I meant about the marketing of this film, and how impossible it must've been. I don't think it was particularly pushed as a kid's film, but that connection by title alone would lead folks to expect a certain film based on their memories of the book. But as the book is about ten pages long, isn't a departure a total necessity anyway?

FWIW, my wife is Japanese and before we watched the movie she didn't know anything about the book and had no expectations, other than being intrigued by the trailer. She loved it, just kept nodding throughout and teared up at the end. So consider her a tiny control group of one. I think the themes that Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze fleshed out from a wisp of a story (a very dense little wisp, to be sure, but ten pages...) was very impressive and portrayed perhaps universal themes about the struggle of childhood and the lack of power and the abuse of power that goes on as you leave behind being a dependent toddler but before the sea change of adolescence.
posted by zardoz at 1:16 AM on October 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

The film turned what was universal into something intensely personal for someone I don't really relate to.

I'm pretty sure that person was me

Sorry guys
posted by ook at 6:02 AM on October 1, 2013 [3 favorites]

I didn't mean to spoil your childhood memories

It's just that I have all this melancholy

And all this rage
posted by ook at 4:09 PM on October 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

I live in a cooperative house and at the time we had fifteen housemates. We were facing some pretty serious fire code violations in our house and in order to fix them the whole house would have to be gutted and renovated and we'd all have to move out. There was a lot of doubt about whether we'd be able to find the money for the renovations and whether we'd be able to keep our group together through the process, whether there'd even be a house at the end.

We all went to the movie together when it opened. The themes that most resonated with me were the parts about loneliness. The monsters and max are trying to build a fort against loneliness, where they can have "a real pile," and it's really hard. It's hard to be with people and have community or family and get along with all the dark parts of people and be there for one another.

And the world makes it that much harder. We don't necessarily know all that much about max's mom's life, but we can infer that all of the usual adult struggles are making it hard for her to be present to him.

The movie just seemed like such an apt metaphor for all the struggles we were going through as a community at the time, trying to hold on to a space to be together amidst all the difficulties. I cried for probably 80% of the film but I left feeling inspired and comforted.

I still live with many of those people in our renovated house so at least this one fort against loneliness remains.
posted by mai at 7:46 AM on October 3, 2013 [1 favorite]